For beyond 5G era, in network function virtualization (NFV) environments, service chaining can be utilized to provide the flexible network infrastructures needed to support the creation of various application services. In this paper, we propose a dynamic service chain construction based on model predictive control (MPC) to utilize network resources. In the proposed method, the number of data packets in the buffer at each node is modeled as a dynamical system for MPC. Then, we formulate an optimization problem with the predicted amount of traffic injecting into each service chain from users for the dynamical system. In the optimization problem, the transmission route of each service chain, the node where each VNF is placed, and the amount of resources for each VNF are determined simultaneously by using MPC so that the amount of resources allocated to VNFs and the number of VNF migrations are minimized. In addition, the performance of data transmission is also controlled by considering the maximum amount of data packets stored in buffers. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation, and the effectiveness of the proposed method with different parameter values is investigated.

Satellite communications (SATCOM) systems play important roles in wireless communication systems. In the future, they will be required to accommodate rapidly increasing communication requests from various types of users. Therefore, we propose a framework for efficient resource management in large-scale SATCOM systems that integrate multiple satellites. Such systems contain hundreds of thousands of communication satellites, user terminals, and gateway stations; thus, our proposed framework enables simpler and more reliable communication between users and satellites. To manage and control this system efficiently, we formulate an optimization problem that designs the network structure and allocates communication resources for a large-scale SATCOM system. In this mixed integer programming problem, we allow the cost function to be a combination of various factors so that SATCOM operators can design the network according to their individual management strategies. These factors include the total allocated bandwidth to users, the number of satellites and gateway stations to be used, and the number of total satellite handovers. Our numerical simulations show that the proposed management strategy outperforms a conventional strategy in which a user can connect to only one specific satellite determined in advance. Furthermore, we determine the effect of the number of satellites in the system on overall system performance.